What If Every Presidential Election Went The Opposite Way? (Part 2)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Previously on Tour's Cabinet of Curiosities. What if every president of the US was their opposite party equivalent? Ordinarily defeats Carter, which Reagan was defeated in his bid for reelection by Democrat Bert Lancaster.

[00:00:14]Lancaster is an unabashed progressive, pro- civil rights, pro-social safety net, slapping tariffs on Japan, Germany, Korea, and other countries bluecollar American jobs are being shipped to.

[00:00:24]Bring them home. referring both to American troops in Vietnam and American industrial jobs. In the 80s, America turns inward and from the semi-secret Maria summit emerges the European economic and military community.

[00:00:39]President Lancaster and House Speaker Tip O'Neal propose Americaare, a national health insurance program modeled partially on Britain's NHS, which would end up being the most generous universal healthcare program in the world. I'm your host, Tor Parsons.

[00:00:55]These are my co-hosts, Jollibee the Durian, Sluds the Shogith, and Thimble the Doll. And welcome back to Tours Cabinet of Curiosities.

[00:01:28]Are you coming home for vacation?

[00:01:32]Can you leave your work behind the manual session? Will you give them all your time? We all feel the same and hope to get your heart.

[00:01:57]Are you coming home?

[00:02:04]>> On September 11th, 2001, the tallest building in the United States, the 2,000 ft ISFC tower in De Moines is destroyed by seven conveniently placed truck bombs in the basement parking lot. The building was 3 days short of its 10th birthday. Fingers are pointed, but everyone knows who probably did it. And within hours, the FBI confirms everyone's suspicions. Texas separatists. By now, Americans buy 10 gallons of ethanol for every one gallon of gas. Gasoline is treated a little bit like those higher octane fuels they have at gas stations. Like, yeah, you can choose to pay extra and put that stuff in your car, but why? It's probably a little better if you really care about your car's performance, but most people aren't serious car geeks. Besides, you need a special permit to drive a car that can run on anything but ethanol these days. The American oil industry has hit rock bottom. The US still has tons of oil reserves in Texas, Alaska, and North Dakota that could be drilled and exported, but America's trade relations with most countries that would buy them aren't great. The glitzy economies of East Asia are America's main economic rival. And besides, they mostly drive electric cars. European cars are about as equally likely to be electric, gas, or ethanol. And for the latter two, they rely on the USSR, which is happy to sell them Siberian oil and Ukrainian corn. There's one faction of Americans who have money, influence, a strong regional identity, and hate the ethanol industry. Texas oil men.

[00:03:30]Gradually, ever since ethanol began to replace gas in the 80s, the roots of a rebellion have begun to spread in Texas.

[00:03:36]Many former oil barons moved up to the Great Plains, started growing corn, and pivoted to being ethanol barons. But others are out for blood. A well-funded secret society called Sam Houston's Revenge has slowly been drip feeding pro-independence messages into Texas politics for years. Never mind that the actual historical Sam Houston wanted Texas to be annexed by the US. Sam Houston's revenge was unmasked in a series of 1993 articles in the Austin American Statesmen. But it just so happened that the revelation occurred right before the Waco siege met its bloody end when a Christian cult compound in central Texas was firebombed by the FBI, killing 86 people, including children. The timing couldn't have been better for Sam Houston's revenge. First, Texans learned some people are trying to make them secede. Then, almost the next day, they get a good reason why.

[00:04:25]Throughout the 90s, it's estimated that close to a majority of Texans support Sam Houston's revenge, although the state's legitimate politicians refused to allow any talk of secession. Other weirdos on the right, free traders, Christian nationalists, militia men, the KKK, have all trickled into the Texas separatist movement. Several different drafts of a potential Texas Constitution circulate on the Minel. A handful of bombings of federal buildings in Texas and buildings connected to the ethanol industry have been attributed to them in the9s. But blowing up the ISFC tower, the deadliest civilian loss of life in American history, is a staggering red line. Initially, President Triver's approval rating rockets to 90%. The entire state of Texas is put under martial law. Governor Anne Richards steps aside and Vice President Hamilton Jordan is declared emergency military commander of Texas while continuing to also serve as vice president. Hundreds of thousands of troops scour the state to find the terrorists to massive support from the American public. And in Texas, where 9/11 led to a pretty substantial loss of support for secession, fundamentalist churches and private Christian schools are shut down.

[00:05:30]Throughout the winter of 2001-202, troops lay siege to a compound belonging to Lamar Hunt, one of the masterminds of the attack in the Piney Woods until they finally break through and capture him.

[00:05:41]Lamar Hunt gets tried in federal court and on the first anniversary of the attack, executed. The first criminal to be formally executed in the US since the abolition of the death penalty in 1985.

[00:05:52]Shrivever's invocation of the Insurrection Act in Texas, approved unanimously by Congress the day after 9/11, allows the perpetrators of the attack to be put to death. But the real ring leader, Lamar's brother, Nelson, is still nowhere to be found. Is he dead?

[00:06:07]Is he abroad? Nobody knows. But Shrivever announces martial law will continue in Texas until the cabalistically named Nelson Bunker Hunt is brought to justice. By the time the 2004 election is approaching, Texans are sick of the occupation. Pro-America anti-separatism rallies that used to occur weekly in the major cities are dwindling to less than 100 attendees each time. For three straight years, Texans have lived under 6 p.m. curfews, limited Minuteel access, and the requirement to carry internal passports to visit another one of the seven military regions the state has been divided into. In 2003, the entire staff of the Daily Texan student newspaper at UT Austin was jailed indefinitely for publishing an unflattering cartoon of Vice President Jordan. Shrivever sees the writing on the wall and lifts some restrictions ahead of the election, but a busload of troops is blown up by an IED in the panhandle in mid-occtober.

[00:06:59]Sam Houston's revenge takes credit and martial law is reimposed. The Republican primaries for 2004 are crowded with a range of candidates expressing a range of views on the Texas occupation. New Mexico Senator Gary Johnson runs a tech-savvy, fiercely anti-occupation campaign that gets a lot of support from young people on the Minuteel, but it fizzles after he lets out a piercing whoop at a rally that gets mocked non-stop in the media. The ultimate victor is two-term Utah Governor Mitt Romney, a moderate with telegenic good looks from a political family. He brings on the four-term governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson, as his running mate. At the Republican National Convention, the 33-year-old newly elected governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, gives a stirring speech that invites interest in his own future political prospects. The polls between Romney and Triver are close, but the mood among conservatives is jubilant. Romney is going to win.

[00:07:49]He's going to end the occupation and lower our taxes, and he loses narrowly.

[00:07:54]Four more years of Bobby Shrivever. The occupation goes on. T-boon Pickkins, a major funer of Sam Houston's revenge, is caught and tortured, refusing to give up the location of Nelson Bunker Hunt. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, killing thousands and almost completely destroying the city.

[00:08:11]President Shrivever blames Governor Jindal for mishandling the disaster.

[00:08:14]Jindal blames Shrivever. On the Minuteel, a month after the storm, an unknown whistleblower leaks emails from Vice President Hamilton Jordan to FEMA director Ed Blakeley from the day after Katrina. Jordan, already an unpopular figure before this for his role as architect of the Texas occupation, tells Blakeley, quote, "Don't send resources too fast. Watch the boy wonder try to curry his way out of this one for a few days and then swoop in like D-Day." I [ __ ] hate that kid. Keeps me up every night that I might be facing him in '08.

[00:08:46]You know, his real name isn't even Bobby. It's some Indian [ __ ] I can't even pronounce. This storm was a godsend. His career had to die. He can't be president. What the [ __ ] is this country? I'd slip my wrists. Hamilton Jordan's approval ratings tumbled to single digits. Although Shrivever keeps him on as vice president. If Bobby Jindal wasn't the front runner for the 2008 Republican nomination before, he is now. and he cementss his place by giving a critically acclaimed speech about race relations where he talks about his parents' immigrant journey and the American dream while standing at the former site of Manila Village, a place in the Louisiana Bayou where Filipino sailors enslaved on Spanish gallions in the 18th century had settled after they mutinied. Sometimes considered the first Asian-American settlement in the US, the Texas occupation is finally scaled down as a demand of the new Republican majority Congress that gets elected in the 2006 midterms. Nelson Bunker Hunt remains a fugitive. 2008 approaches amid a softening economy and plummeting approval ratings for the Shrivever administration. Bobby Jindal has massive support from young people and on the Minel, but a lot of the GOP establishment is backing Senator Olympia Snow, who everyone assumed would run for president eventually, even back when her husband John Mccernan announced his run.

[00:09:58]The primaries go down to the wire, but Jindal finally defeats Snow and at 37 becomes the youngest major party nominee for president in history. In the Democratic primaries, Hamilton Jordan can't possibly be a candidate. Most of the party coaleses around the choice of Bob Kerry, the president of the University of Nebraska system and former governor and senator from that state.

[00:10:18]Carrie is a good pick. He doesn't have ties to the unpopular Shrivever administration. He was a Vietnam war hero who lost a leg from a grenade and he's a moderate with a track record of winning in a high population swing state. Jindal is expected to pick Olympia Snow as his running mate as a consolatory gesture to the Republican mainstream, but she's done playing second fiddle to anyone. He instead picks the aging senior senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley. The choice of Grassly, an old GOP stalwart, is seen as a repudiation of the hard right and reassurance to Republicans who thought Jindal was too young, too foreign, too inexperienced, or too radical. More specifically, Grassly is a means of signaling that even though they're against the Texas occupation, the Republicans don't support the oil industry. Obviously, he comes from Iowa, the richest state in the union, and has always had strong ties to the ethanol industry. Texas is almost back to normal, but the only long-term consequence of the occupation seems to have been to cement Texas separatism as a permanent feature of US politics. Now openly espoused by some, though nowhere near all, state level elected officials in Texas, something that would be unthinkable before 9/11. Once again, after seeing the federal response, now it seems a lot more reasonable. Even many Americans outside Texas think that after everything Bobby Shrivever put the Lone Star State through, they have the right to secede. And even though the occupation had near universal support inside and outside Texas at the start, so Shrivever can't fully be blamed, Shrivever's occupation of Texas rapidly comes to be seen as one of America's greatest blunders and a black mark against the entire Kennedy Shrivever family legacy. Carrie is down in the polls, so he wants to make a high-risk, highreward choice for his running mate.

[00:11:56]He picks a littleknown congresswoman from Georgia, the first black person on a national ticket, Cynthia McKenna. Why?

[00:12:02]Well, her is interesting, right? And the progressive wing of the party had reservations about Carrie all along.

[00:12:08]They deserve a vice president of their own. But McKini is a lightning rod for controversy. She's promoted a wide range of conspiracy theories over the course of her career. She had already been defeated in a Democratic primary in 2002 over her consistent support for America's geopolitical enemies such as Israel. And her dad, also a small-time Georgia politician, responded to the defeat with an unapologetically racist tirade against Japanese business interests who he claimed had rigged the election against her. In 2004, McKini returned to her old house seat, but was accused of punching a capital police officer in 2006. On the stump in 2008, McKini tries to deny her controversial past, but she isn't a very convincing public speaker, and Americans worry about what would happen if the elderly disabled Carrie were to die in office and leave the country in her hands.

[00:12:55]Car's polls slide even further. In the summer of 2008, right after the party conventions, all of a sudden, Vice President Hamilton Jordan dies at just 63 of meloma contracted from exposure to asbestous back when he was in Vietnam.

[00:13:09]Most eyes are dry, but there's a big state funeral that briefly redirects attention onto President Shrivever.

[00:13:14]Naturally, Shrivever appoints Bob Kerry as the new vice president to fill in the rest of Jordan's term. Okay, here's a memory from the real 2008 that you might not have thought about since then. I was in elementary school at that point. And around then, the equivalent of 67 today was Bob. Literally, just the name Bob.

[00:13:33]In American elementary and middle schools from like 2008 to 2012, the name Bob was considered inherently funny. And people would just say it in random circumstances. If there was an empty desk in class, there was an imaginary student there named Bob. You could be the funniest, cleverest kid in third grade by drawing a stick figure and declaring his name is Bob. Sometimes Bob had a wife named Bobina. Heaven forbid someone mentioned that their real life dad's name is Bob or that a substitute teacher steps in and announces he's Bob.

[00:14:01]the class would lose their [ __ ] Anyway, as intense as the Bob phenomenon got in our timeline, and I I swear to God this was a phenomenon. Please back me up on this. In this video's timeline, it would be a thousand times bigger given that this world's 2008 election, not only are the major party candidates named Bob and Bobby, the incumbent president they're vying to succeed is also named Bobby. We get a full 16 consecutive years where the president's name is Bobby. I wasn't trying to make the timeline turn out that way. We just happen to end up in the Bob maxing triumph of the Bobs world. Jindal wins in a landslide and is met with monumental approval ratings and op-eds about a post-racial America.

[00:14:41]People wonder if Jindal is going to allow in more immigrants. After all, his own parents got to America during the 1960s7s Immigration Wave enabled by LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. An act that was gradually dismantled by a series of court decisions over the course of Bert Lancaster and Sergeant Triver's presidencies. America has had record low rates of immigration for the past 20 years, and as a result, it's beginning to suffer from problems that their main economic rival, Japan, doesn't have. The American population is aging and projected to decline by the end of the 2010s. But Jindal doesn't open up immigration, preferring to spend the first year of his presidency pushing a colossal deficit reduction package. The global economy takes a hit in 2008, but the US is somewhat insulated from the shock because of just how cut off from the global economy they are. For just a year in 2009, Japan dips back below the US on the list of the world's biggest economies, which leads to a lot of triumphalism in the mainstream American papers about how the Lancaster economic model is superior. But America has another nearer rival. While Canadians have a tendency to enviously compare the US's generous universal healthcare system to Canada's patchy, underfunded equivalent, both Canucks and Americans generally agree things are better north of the border. The median income in Canada overtook the US in 2002, and the gap has only widened. In fact, the size of Canada's real economy is on track to overtake that of the US within the 2020s. Even though Canada's population is so much smaller, taxes are far lower up there. Canadians drive around in powerful Russian electric cars and use dazzling Japanese gadgets, which are expensive and hard to find in the US.

[00:16:18]Back when Sergeant Triver was president, he instituted a program of universal public car insurance, which Canada doesn't have. This is constantly used by US politicians as a cudel against the idea that things are better in Canada.

[00:16:29]Well, in Canada, if your car breaks down, you're just screwed. You have to pay out of pocket, right? Americans ask Canadians, "What do you do when your brand new car just stops working?" To which Canadians say, "What do you mean brand new cars never do that?" The apparent success of the Canadian experiment has reoriented politics in Canada. As of 2011, the prime minister is Olivia Chow of the left-wing NDP, who succeeded her husband, Jack Leighton, when he died of cancer shortly after he'd won the 2011 election, defeating Kim Cample's bid for a sixth consecutive term and finally ending her premiership, one of the longest in the Democratic world. That's Canadian healthcare for you. American Democrats ghoullishly joke about Leighton's death. But the big story is that the NDP landslide in 2011 didn't change Canada's trade policy.

[00:17:17]Even the Canadian left has endorsed free trade by now. Going to the US and seeing Americans driving their stick shift ethanol cars from Ford or GM or calling people on bulky flip phones from IBM or Stars and Stripes Technology, which changed its name from Texas Instruments in 2002. Canadians who are used to vacationing in Cuba begin jokingly referring to that country as little Cuba. Much like a six-year-old asking you, "What's under there?" When they say little Cuba, it's meant to provoke the response, "What's big Cuba?" To which Kucks respond with a [ __ ] eating grin.

[00:17:50]That's a huge exaggeration. The US is still neck-and-neck with Japan as the world's biggest economy. The median American is still richer than people in all but 20 or so countries, and American technology isn't that far behind the cutting edge in Japan and the USSR.

[00:18:05]America is still generally agreed to be the world's main center of medical innovation for one thing as the world's best doctors, but they aren't paid very much. It's estimated that a fifth of the doctors in Canada are US immigrants. And all the statistics suggesting the US is doing fine actually are no match for treats. As social media goes live, American influencers do videos where they go into convenience stores in Canada, marveling at the incredible range of snacks and trinkets from across the world Canadians can buy and comparing them to the smaller, more expensive equivalents in the US. But this doesn't register with most Americans quite yet. At the time, one of the biggest news stories of Jindal's first term is the 2011 capture of Nelson Bunker Hunt. At long last, the mastermind of 9/11 was found under extremely unlikely circumstances. A server at a location of Runza, the world's largest fast food chain in Midtown Manhattan, recognized a patron's Texas accent, and even though the wheelchairbound man didn't resemble Hunt at all, reported to the police that his voice reminded her of Nelson Bunker Hunt. Against all odds, it really was him, having undergone extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance and spending the past decade living in a fake wheelchair. Why was he in New York City of all places? It just didn't seem like a place a Texas oil man would live, he says. And he has a point since he successfully hid out there for 10 years.

[00:19:27]Under an assumed name, posing as an aging disabled Vietnam veteran, he lived on the top floor of an otherwise abandoned walk up in Greenwich Village, the only building still standing on its block after Mayor Al Sharpton tore down thousands of crumbling empty buildings across the city in the9s. New York's decline has continued a pace since the 70s. It fell to the eighth biggest city in the US in the 2010 census, behind Omaha at 7th. Nelson Bunker Hunt is executed shortly before the 2012 election. President Jindal formally ends the officially still in effect state of emergency in Texas, rebanning the death penalty and fully restoring all constitutional rights to Texans. In the future, the 2012 election will be seen as the last election held under the long shadow of Bert Lancaster. Under Jindal's first term, there had been an anti-austerity movement on the left called the Tea Party, but in general, they were big fans of tariffs. They revered Lancaster as America's greatest president, and after being credited with a blue wave in the 2010 midterms, the movement had already mostly fizzled out by 2012. The Democratic nominee in 2012 is a decidedly establishment figure, former Minnesota Governor Skip Humphrey, son of Hubert Humphrey. His vice presidential nominee is Chris Van Holland, a young foreign policy-minded congressman from Maryland. They lead in the polls for some of the year amid a sluggish economic recovery, but ultimately Jindal prevails in a close election. Neither candidate suggests that anything about the isolationist model that has dominated American politics since the 80s is bad actually.

[00:20:54]And then slowly, imperceptibly at first, unrest begins to tick upward. Unrest about race, about gender, about class, about everything. Seemingly apolitical communities on the Minotel became angrier and more rattled by conflict.

[00:21:10]This doesn't register to the pundit class at first. The economy is back on track, or at least back on track enough.

[00:21:16]The population is aging, but everyone knows that's not a real problem. That's only a problem if you care about economic growth. And who cares about that? Say the mainstream candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That's just a line going up on a graph. Don't you like your singlepayer healthcare? You don't want to live in a capitalist dystopia like Canada, do you?

[00:21:36]No. No. Now, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. After serving as Jindal's Secretary of State, it's finally time for Olympia Snow to have her chance at the presidency in 2016.

[00:21:47]The party establishment treats the primary as a coronation. But to everyone's surprise, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky puts up a remarkably strong challenge to her, hearkening back to an older era of the Republicans when they were for limited government and free trade when economic growth was something to aspire to, not sneer at before Mccernin and Snow moved the party to the center. Snow wins the primaries, but she's dogged by allegations that the party may have rigged the convention voting for her. But this is practically ignored by the media in comparison to the circus that is the Democratic primary. Early on, it was expected that Senator Mark Shrivever of Maryland, brother of Bobby and son of Sergeant, would be the presumptive nominee. But he never pulled outside single digits.

[00:22:27]That's partly because there are billion candidates, practically half the Senate and damn near every Democrat governor is running, but also because a real black swan of a candidate has shown up out of nowhere and turned the election upside down. Steve Jobs. He's only lived back in America for a few years after spending most of his adult life working on gadgets with Atari in Japan. In the 2000s, he'd battled a pancreatic tumor, which he allegedly initially wanted to have treated with acupuncture, juice cleanses, and other hippie woo woo. But his Japanese doctors refused and gave him chemotherapy against his wishes, saving his life. After Jobs released the device that really changed the world, the translucent, brightly colored Atari Tiger smartphone in 2007, he became a household name outside Japan, too.

[00:23:09]Although few Americans can afford Atari products, surviving a bout with cancer gave Jobs a new perspective on the world, and he came to wonder if making phones and consoles really was his life's calling. Even though the global media treated him like a god for making phones and consoles, he wants something else. He misses his carefree ' 60s Bay Area childhood, the dream of progress and eternal economic growth that seemed to just be everywhere in the background in those days. The way America turned its back on its all. He has visions of global supply chains making the whole world richer, of the United States, the country that he had to grudgingly leave because of tariffs, leading this globalized economy. So, he returns to the US, buys a massive compound on the site of a hippie commune in Oregon, where he had once lived when he was young, and starts preaching his agenda.

[00:23:54]And it's this: slash tariffs, bring in all the immigrants we can. In Job's flashy campaign announcement at the US offices of Atari in Portland, he stokes controversy by proclaiming that when Canada opened their doors to immigration, quote, "They didn't take the jobs of any citizen worth anything.

[00:24:10]If they displaced anyone, they're displacing rapists. They're displacing crime. They're displacing drugs." His motto is, "Make America great again."

[00:24:18]His followers wear pink beanie hats that say MAGA on them. Jobs refuses to apologize for anything, continuing to trash America's isolationist anti-growth culture on the campaign trail. He calls Bob Kerry an imperialist for losing his leg in Vietnam. Somehow, his polls keep on climbing and climbing. No fellow Democrat can land an attack on him that sticks. It's accepted just a few primaries in that the election is going to be Snow versus Jobs. Pundits wait with baited breath for Job's running mate announcement. He is such a departure from the Democratic consensus.

[00:24:49]Clearly, he has to pick someone closer to the party mainstream, and he does. US Senator from Michigan, Bob King, proving that you still have to have a Bob on your presidential ticket. You can't just not have a Bob. It's not allowed. King has only been in the Senate for 2 years, having been elected in 2014, succeeding the long-erving Carl 11. Before that, King was the leader of the United Auto Workers. Understandably, union voters are the most skeptical plank of the Democratic Coalition toward jobs economic agenda. And while the choice of King is somewhat successful in getting them on his side, it also presents hurdles because their attitudes toward trade are completely at odds. To the awe and confusion of the media, though, King goes full MAGA and begins aggressively praising Jobs on the stump, including his support for free trade. Somehow making the argument that actually allowing Japanese and Russian cars into America would be great for the American auto worker. Jobs attacks both his main opponents, Mark Shrivever in the Democratic primaries and Olympia Snow in the general, for having supported the Texas occupation. But that doesn't mean he's soft on right-wing nationalism. He proclaims Christianity to be America's greatest enemy and says that Americans should have to sign a statement denying the existence of God in order to be eligible to seek office. Olympia Snow picks a relatively ordinary, unremarkable, non-Applecart upsetting running mate, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. Late night comedians snark about how every single major party candidate's name is a word in the dictionary. Of course, Steve Jobs is going to lose. He's going to lose in the largest landslide in history, obviously.

[00:26:16]But at least Jobs King looks better on a lawn sign than snow blunt. And then he wins, albeit without the popular vote.

[00:26:25]We're through the looking glass now.

[00:26:27]What does a Steve Jobs administration look like? Ultimately, not really that unfamiliar, just more chaotic and more plagued by scandals. A year into the Jobs presidency, a common take is that this is just a surprisingly normal Democratic administration and that Jobs has come under the control of the unions and the special interest groups that control Democratic policy just the same as his predecessors. Some bureaucrats who last served in Bobby Shrivever's cabinet come back to serve under jobs.

[00:26:53]Jobs talks a lot about reducing tariffs and he does successfully renegotiate Shrivever Perau with Congress, but ultimately his revamp to Shrivever Perau doesn't change much. A lot of the things Jobs does are just symbolic culture war posturing that does nothing but piss people off. For instance, he doesn't invite the leaders of America's biggest unions to have dinner with him at the White House on Mayday, a tradition practiced by every president since Lancaster. At a summit with the CME that opens with a minute of silence for the Holocaust, Jobs interrupts it 5 seconds early, which really seems to just be an honest mistake. But Jobs digs himself a deeper hole by proclaiming a few days later that it didn't matter because the Holocaust pales in comparison to the genocides America is currently committing against black, brown, and queer people. On Fox News, the plain-spoken former vice president Chuck Grassley says what everyone is thinking.

[00:27:43]Then why don't you stop them? You're the president. Jobs tries to pass his deny God to run for office law through an executive order, but the courts obviously block this. The Constitution couldn't be clearer, that you can't impose a religious test on office holders. Jobs's attorney general, former Arizona Congresswoman Kirsten Cinema, argues for a fringe interpretation of the Constitution, claiming that this is exactly what the founding fathers wanted. The Constitution sets out state atheism as an official creed, and the no religious test clause actually means office holders should be tested to make sure they're not religious. The courts don't listen for now, but Jobs keeps naming more and more federal judges, and Senate Majority Leader Barbara Lee of California, a strong opponent turned strong ally of Jobs, like most prominent Democrats, makes sure the judicial nominations sail through Congress. Even the one thing that you'd think Jobs really would execute well, a modernization of the federal computer systems fails spectacularly, forcing several federal agencies to temporarily shut down. For 3 days in November 2017, all flights in or over the US are grounded because of bugs in the new Atari OSbased air traffic control software. Immigration laws are left unchanged, but Jobs orders the Texas Stabilization Force, a branch of the military created after 9/11, whose mission mostly pivoted to guarding the Mexican border as the occupation rounddown, to leave the border alone and instead focus on investigating Southern Baptist preachers for homophobia. The TSF's mandate has always extended beyond Texas. Soon, across the country, heavily armed TSF agents are a common sight sitting in the back pews of churches on Sunday, monitoring the content of sermons. But they never arrest anyone.

[00:29:24]Not yet. Immigration soarses, especially illegally. Hispanics in border states, typically understood to be a strongly Democratic and obviously strongly anti-immigration constituency, begin voting Republican in record numbers starting in the 2018 midterms. At one point in 2019, Jobs announces a moonshot to build super intelligent AI, tasking the American-born French national Sam Alman with control over it. The press is beused and mostly covers this as Jobs indulging in silly sci-fi speculation.

[00:29:54]But his friendly AI institute, headquartered in the Bay Area, because real estate is cheap there, manages to get a hefty chunk of federal funding.

[00:30:02]NASA is revived, too, and America launches its first astronauts since the8s to general disdain from the media.

[00:30:08]The defining feature of the jobs presidency is the backlash to it.

[00:30:12]Marches against his policies take place daily in cities big and small.

[00:30:16]Republicans take back the House and Senate with strong majorities in 2018.

[00:30:19]They come to believe that the backlash has permanently shifted the Overton window, right? that things like prayer in public schools or a compulsory national military draft are now not just feasible but necessary. Some hardline Republicans sort of understand Job's appeal as someone who speaks to the dispossessed working man and is largely correct about free trade. Rand Paul gears up for another presidential run now with some institutional support that he didn't have in 2016. But the protrade side of the GOP definitely doesn't try to join forces with MAGA. Even as they agree on economics, they could never get behind Job's open hatred of Christianity, white people, and American history. Even Abraham Lincoln has had his bust removed from the White House.

[00:31:01]The 2020 Republican primaries start earlier than any presidential race on record. Everyone in the race is trying to outflank everyone else from the right except for one, Chuck Grassley, one of the only major candidates running as an unapologetic moderate. Grassly is old, but he's not dead. probably he's not retired. Since leaving the vice presidency in 2017, he's been serving as the CEO of the Iowa State Pension Fund, nicknamed the Corn Crib, the largest investment fund in the world. The Corn Crib was established by the Lancaster administration and Governor Henry Wallace in 1987 to reinvest the sky-high profits from America's pivot to ethanol.

[00:31:36]Grassly isn't very inspiring on the stump other than occasional quotably blunt lines like, "You're the president." But as a known quantity, he maintains a consistent lead in the polls. It seems what Americans want more than anything is a return to normal.

[00:31:51]Meanwhile, public services are declining. This is one of the main themes of the MAGA movement. But now Jobs gets the blame because he isn't making things better. America's universal healthare system once the envy of the world now sees monthlong wait times for a simple checkup. Americans pay the world's highest taxes, and it's not even close. those who have the means to get private healthcare in Mexico do so. And if the strain on Americaare was rough before 2020, well, the world is about to change. Despite jobs best efforts, the US is still very cut off from the outside world. So, they get a few months to prepare as CO spreads across the rest of the planet. It counts for nothing, though. Eventually, in spring 2020, the dam breaks and the US quickly leaps to the highest CO infection rate in the world. Jobs orders the TSF, who at this point are sort of his own private militia, to throw together field hospitals. But Americaare isn't built to handle the pandemic.

[00:32:44]Anger builds as hospitals turn away thousands of patients, reaching a breaking point when a moderately successful local businessman from Minnesota, George Floyd, gets seriously injured in a car accident, taken to a hospital by a good Samaritan, and is told while he bleeds out in the lobby that there's no space in the hospital right now. and a pair of security guards drag him out the front doors and leave him to die. Floyd's gruesome death is captured on a security camera and spread to the world. It's made worse by the revelation that there were in fact plenty of beds open in the hospital, but they couldn't be used because of Americare regulations that require a substantial percentage of hospital beds to always be empty in the case of a mass casualty event. The hitherto quiet streets erupt in protest. Our taxes for this, say Americans. The movement adopts the slogan, "My money matters," triplem for short. It's a big enough movement that not everyone is protesting the exact same thing for the exact same reason. But its demands mostly center around relaxing laws around the healthcare industry, allowing private insurance, lowering taxes, spending the existing tax money better, or some combination of those. Somem activists want to fully abolish Americaare or abolish taxes. Republican politicians insist that nobody actually supports those things, but one glance at social media makes it clear that a lot of people, or at least a handful of extremely loud people, do. Americans get subjected to weeks of think pieces about how universal healthcare doesn't make us any healthier, how Americaare is responsible for drug addiction and leniency on crime, and how the real root cause of poor health is that Americans are working too hard to pay taxes. they don't get anything back from. To some extent, it's a grassroots movement, but it doesn't feel like one given its massive support from the intelligencia and professional organizations and from all the conservative activist groups that gained enough power from the backlash to President Jobs that they practically form a parallel shadow government of red America. Pollsters, journalists, even just random people who catch the eye of the media get fired for statements insufficiently criticizing America. Celebrities who support Americaare are forced to film tearful apologies where they call themselves uneducated. Abolishing Americaare never pulls beyond single digits despite being talked about in glowing terms in legacy newspapers. Defunding American with a range of interpretations, pulls support from about a third of Americans at its peak. Turns out universal healthcare is pretty damn popular. Americaare is one of the most trusted institutions in the country and a terrible thing to start a movement explicitly against. The general premise of the protests that America's taxes are too high draws more support, peaking with about a 60% approval rate in Midsummer. And even Skip Humphrey, now a senator, joins a triplem rally in DC. One of the few elected Democrats to openly support the protests, but Americans begin to tire of it by the fall. jobs campaigns on reinforcing Americaare funding, running ads set in a dystopian future where the Republicans defunded Americ. Chuck Grassley wins the Republican presidential primaries, narrowly defeating Rand Paul after several other candidates drop out to help Grassly. And he emphasizes his own support for Americas conditional praise form protests. His vice presidential nominee, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, is attacked by TripleM activists for her pre-politics career as an accountant for an Americanare hospital. Grassly opens up a wide lead in the polls, but the election is ultimately very close. It takes days for most media networks to call Grassly as the victor, and Jobs refuses to concede. But he will concede, right? He hasn't conceded yet, but he'll concede tomorrow, says everyone.

[00:36:22]Throughout the 2020 holiday season, the county canvases are complete. Courts reaffirm again and again a narrow, grassly victory. Behind the scenes, jobs is plotting. Strange power outages break out across swing states. A computer system flags thousands of ballots as fraudulent in Georgia. A manual canvas confirms they're legit. Congressional Democrats begin circulating a memo explaining how they can object to the certification of electoral votes. One low-level staffer in the jobs white house posts a photo of a manila folder headlined top secret operation zero day on the minuteel. Other leaks suggest the existence of other documents marked zero day. All the known documents are in Japanese which Jobs is fluent in seemingly to make it more difficult for the media to discover. The details are revealed by a hacker on New Year's Day.

[00:37:10]On January 26th, 2021, as the vote is certified, Jobs plans to unveil a dossier supposedly providing proof of massive voter fraud and declare martial law in response. Troops are being drilled, tanks are being fueled up as we speak. The left-wing media ecosystem tries to call the documents fake, but Attorney General Cinema confirms their authenticity, resigning in disgrace.

[00:37:33]Right before Grassly is sworn in, Jobs is impeached by the House. One vote in the Senate saves him from being banned from seeking office ever again. The COVID vaccine is declared ready for roll out right around Grassly's inauguration day, but uptake is slow, and the vaccine developed in the US turns out to be less effective than the European, Indian, and Japanese vaccines, also going into people's arms. In the summer of 2021, Grassly embarrassingly admits that the foreign vaccines are better and signs a deal to import millions of doses of the CME's vaccine, which fans the flames of antivax sentiment. Vaccine skepticism has been a major current on the American left since the days of Armorixen. Even Steve Jobs endorsement of the vaccine doesn't sway people. American vaccination rates are the world's lowest for a developed country. President Grassly begins to acknowledge that a bit of free trade, dialing down the protectionism, may be the corrective America needs after all. He staffs his White House with former rivals who'd worked for Rand Paul. As part of a post-pandemic stimulus bill, Grassly introduces a targeted reduction of some tariffs and a repeal of the Jones Act, allowing foreignbuilt ships to carry American cargo. It passes with bipartisan support, signaling that the US has entered a truly new era of economic policy. But it doesn't help Grassly's approval rating, which is in the toilet just a few months into his presidency. Who's going to challenge him in 2024? Attention turns to Illinois Governor Rod Bluyovich, who lost his first bid for the office way back in 2002, but made a comeback in the jobs year. Blago is a hardline culture warrior, calling everything from Veterans Day parades to the state American history curriculum fascist. His Stop Fascism Act, nicknamed the Don't Say God Bill by the press, criminalizes public display of religious symbols and requires religious schools to register their teachers exact theological beliefs with the state. Blago issues an executive order requiring colleges in Illinois, even private ones, to exclusively consider identity in admissions. Test scores are again fascist. He takes on the ethanol industry, which has a substantial presence in Illinois, demanding they pay reparations for the climate damage they've caused. W-ally World, the largest ethanol cooperative, ends up winning a series of lawsuits against the Bgoyovich administration, but they shut down farms and refineries in Illinois as retaliation. In a funny detail of one of the suits, Blaco is forced to define his favorite insult in order to substantiate his claim that W-ally World is fascist.

[00:39:57]His lawyers define fascism as belief that there are differences between people. Nearly everything Blago passes is challenged for being unconstitutional, sometimes successfully, but the scariest thing to Republicans is that he seems to be genuinely very popular in Illinois. If he runs, Grassly is doomed. The Supreme Court throws an unexpected wrench into the 2022 midterms early in the summer, legalizing gay marriage nationwide. Some states have had legal gay marriage since way back in the early 90s. And every decade since then, a couple more states have legalized it. But it didn't register as a serious issue until Jobs presidency and still doesn't command national support. After the salad days of the 80s, when Lancaster was sympathetic to gay rights and it seemed like marriage equality could be achieved by the end of the century, the failure of Armorixen left queer people very skeptical of the government's ability to do anything for them. Gay rights activism has largely become a fringe libertarian cause supported by the same sort of people who support gun rights.

[00:40:58]The somewhat libertarian-minded Steve Jobs was the first candidate to really center gay rights in a national campaign. Jobs takes credit for the Supreme Court's ruling, rightfully so, because he appointed three justices to it, but it's not hugely popular with the public, and it allows both parties in the 2022 midterms to claim that they're challenging the status quo. The midterms are a draw with almost no incumbents of either party losing seats and the lack of a blue wave is blamed on Job's intervention. For the first time since 2015, he doesn't seem to be the leader of the Democratic party. Now everyone's saying Blegoyovic is. But the situation doesn't hold. Jobs is arraigned in court for Operation Zero Day, the first president to face criminal charges, and that gets the progressive media world defending him once again. He isn't slated to face trial until after the election. Now he has to win, or so he feels. Blago, after winning re-election in a landslide in 22, begins to see most of his agenda fall apart amid constitutional challenges. The dream of a post Steve Jobs Democratic party may have to wait. The 2024 Democratic primary looks to be a referendum on Steve Jobs and MAGA. Do Americans want him back? Certainly seems like Democrats do. A few years ago, it seemed like Bgoyovich would only run if jobs didn't.

[00:42:15]But now, it's shaping up to be a showdown between the two of them. The cult leader versus the culture warrior.

[00:42:20]Bgoyovich certainly seems to have a more focused political agenda, even if it consists almost exclusively of culture war demagoguery. Now, he's even calling Steve Jobs a fascist. The voters aren't having it. Some pundits predicted a close race, but it's not. Blago drops out after the first primary. Job's only real primary opponent ends up being Mary Pelta, who was governor of Alaska and then Job's first term secretary of the interior. She wins a single primary in Wyoming, where there are probably like five Democrats. Since Grassly, at 90 years old, refuses to allow any talk of stepping down, by early summer, the nominees are well established enough that an unusually early presidential debate is held. As Jobs turns on his reality distortion field, pouring on the charm even as he warns of the existential crises that America's isolation has led us into, Grassly barely talks about politics at all, preferring to yammer about the decline of the History Channel and shouts out a particular Dairy Queen in Iowa as a good place for you know what. Republicans erupt in protest. Bobby Jindal comes back out of his retirement to negotiate a solution. About a month after the debate, the scenile grassly announces he won't be seeking reelection, and the new Republican nominee will be Nikki Haley.

[00:43:35]Some pundits expect jobs to pick a vice presidential candidate closer to the Democratic mainstream, like Senator Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts, but there isn't much of a Democratic mainstream to speak of by this point. At a rally in Texas, a teenager with no clear political ideology fires two bullets at Jobs. One hits him in the hand. A snapshot of Jobs raising his bloodied fist becomes an immediate entry into the pantheon of legendary historic photos. The way Maga treats his wound, it's widely compared in the media to a stigmata. If there was ever any doubt about the hold Jobs still held over the party, it's completely erased. And at the convention, Jobs announces his vice presidential nominee, four-star General Chelsea Manning, the world's highest ranking transgender military officer and a former opponent of Jobs in 2016, who has since become, no pun intended, his strongest soldier. I had to do this because I needed a context to use this photo of me at Chelsea Manning's birthday party a few months ago.

[00:44:30]Chelsea, if you're watching this, leave a comment and I'll pin it. The polls are neck andneck throughout the fall. Haley doesn't campaign much and hesitates to give a position on hot button issues.

[00:44:39]She refuses point blank to distance herself from Grassly, insisting that Grassly was actually a great president, which might end up being seen as true in the future, but isn't going to change voters minds. She does campaign appearances with Hamilton Jordan Jr., who served a few terms as a congressman from North Carolina before he was pushed out of the Democratic party for supporting jobs impeachment. But does that really resonate with anyone? Does anyone believe Hamilton Jordan was a good person? Is that a legacy you really want to claim? The election ends up being close and in line with the polls, but the press treats it as an unexpected landslide. Jobs is back in his old job.

[00:45:16]Jobs assembles what gets described in the media as the most far-left cabinet America has ever seen. Although Jobs reality distortion field is such that just 10 years ago, many of these figures wouldn't be considered leftwing at all.

[00:45:28]Jobs makes one of his main priorities convening a committee to cut bloat and make the government function more efficiently. The person he tasks with this isn't even American. It's the South African-born Canadian electric car tycoon Elon Musk, who moves from his former home at the Tesla headquarters in Edmonton to DC for the job. Musk names the committee SCAT. It stands for State Capacity Action Team. And yes, it's supposed to spell SCAT. It's a reference to some meme that you need to spend far too much time on the Minuteel to get.

[00:45:56]Musk staffs scat with extremely young allies of his, putting most of its functions in the hands of 26-year-old UPEN graduate Luigi Manion. For attorney general, Jobs appoints Colorado Congresswoman Cyra, who announces that her goal is to quote eradicate whiteness from every facet of American life. The Texas Stabilization Force is sent into conservative states to purportedly root out bigotry, firing on unarmed protesters practically every chance they get. Tariffs are completely slashed, leading to an influx of cheap, low-quality goods, but also a wave of unemployment. Factories go idle. Elon and Luigi quit the White House after just a few months, but not after completely hollowing out Americaare funding. Looks like the TripleM people got their wish after all. Isn't it everything they hoped for? And then one day, President Jobs gets a call from Sam Alman. Remember that project you funded back in 2019? He asks. Well, watch this.

[00:46:50]Hours later, astronauts in orbit at the CME space station are shocked to find they can't establish contact with anywhere on Earth.

[00:47:31]You believe in something right but you do something wrong.

[00:47:38]A little question will break your bones.

[00:47:41]What puts you on your knees?

[00:47:45]You're painting the walls and red the color of your heart.

[00:47:52]But the man and gray will get you now.

[00:47:55]You've got to hide or take the blame.